Alright, we just established the start of the story. The start involved the plotting and planning of three different factions, the Marauders, the Game Masters, and the Shai empire as they slowly drew their plans together to defeat the hated Dominion.
So lets get down to business with chapter one.
I apologize if it seems a bit long at 2500 words. But I didn't see any way I could split it without it ending up being too short or ending at an awkward point of time
Chapter 1
“In history, many more optimistic fellows than I have dared to call the planet a utopia. As much as it pains me to say this, I don’t think that we have passed that boundary yet. Inequality and ignorance still permeates the consciousness of, unfortunately, a fair part of our citizenry. Many others have still however pointed to the massive scientific and social developments all over the planet as proof of our perfection. People are happier than they ever have been. They seem to have found their peace at last. In saying this, I am reminded to speak a few words about what I would consider to be the greatest evils of mankind. These evils are not lifestyles, nor are they even certain people or types of people. They are the unholy trinity of oppression, ignorance and chaos.” Doctor Emmanuel Tam’s commencement address at Oxford, Class of 2149.
Johanna U.N. Peace Keepers Base, Washington D.C., North America May 15th, 2157
Three years? That seemed about right. Has it really been three years? It seems like it was only a month ago. Sergeant Whitney Blackburne stood near the window of her room, looking out amongst the lights of the city that glowed all around her. The massive arcologies at the mall loomed as if they were gargantuan monoliths that eclipsed the sky, standing well over a kilometer and a half towards the heavens. The prodigious structures glowed like great night lights, illuminated from the windows of a hundred-thousand inhabitants. Each building was a self sustained ecosystem where an individual could spend their whole life inside the building and never have to leave. It was common for an arcology to be the home for fifty-thousand to one-hundred thousand people if not more.
She casually ran a hand through her spiky bubblegum pink hair. Her locks had been kept dyed that way since she had been fifteen, almost a decade ago. The outlandish color had given rise to the nickname that had become routine usage to the soldiers around her. It had originated back with a drill sergeant when she had been taking basic training. Even now Pixie could picture him standing right in front of her, glaring down at her as if she had personally insulted his mother. She could hear the rasp of his voice, smell the taste of his foul breath as he scowled down at her.
“And what the hell is this in front of me?! Some kind of damn pixie?!” he had roared, almost deafening her from his tone.
Pixie. The name had stuck. At first she had fought against her fellows adapting such a diminishing moniker. The tag was demeaning and nothing more than an embarrassing aspect of mockery and derision, the last thing she needed. Maaka Makaore had thought no such thing. He had told her that he found the name to be prize, something wonderful. He had complemented her on it! At that point, she had almost let her hair revert back to its dusty blonde color just to get people to drop the moniker, but Maaka had convinced her to keep her hair as it was.
Maaka Makoare. He had been her only friend through the entirety of basic. The only person who had managed to see past her hardened exterior into the person that she had truly been. The two of them had stayed in the same squad by some miracle of fate after completing basic. Both had been promoted to Corporal on the same week. They were exclusive sparring partners, even becoming known as the “Dangerous Duo” a rather lackluster title, considering both of them were masters of several martial arts.
And then came command school. The Katzenmeir School of Military Command or K-Com as it was more commonly called by the enlisted soldiers. The school was the most prestigious and well-known of tactical command schools in the world today. For a soldier from the standard enlisted ranks to simply secure a spot at K-Com was unheard of. But Maaka had been the first to suggest they both go for it. She had been rather wary of the whole concept, unsure as to whether or not she was even decent commissioned officer material. She had only enlisted to get the appropriate credit for a complete tuition payment to the secular university of her choice. Becoming a commissioned officer was a massive lifestyle change, completely rewriting her plans for her own future.
Finally she had relented, giving in to his constant appeals to her own sense of ambition. They had finally taken the plunge almost three years ago. She and Maaka had applied, taken the tests and waited for the results. As could be expected, Maaka got in. It would have been surprising had anything else happened. Maaka was incredibly smart, a gifted tactician, and a charismatic person. All of those qualities and more were perfect for what the Peacekeepers wanted in a commissioned officer.
But she on the other had had not been what they wanted. The actual results send back to her had proclaimed that she “was of sound tactician mind” and declared she was “a gifted diplomat” but that her own aptitude for intelligence was “not what they are currently looking for”.
The nerve of them! It made her blood boil even thinking about it now. They had actually suggested that she wasn’t smart enough to be a commissioned officer. My grades in high school hadn’t been anything to brag about, true, but they were certainly no indicator for future achievement. She had later broken several fingers in her right fist and had been completely in the dark as to how this occurred. Maaka had informed her she broke them when she put her fist through the nearest wall, shattering the support board right where she contacted. Hey had tried to console her, and told her to simply apply again at a later date.
She had thought that Maaka would at least be generous enough to reject the offer until they both received it and they both could go. The duo had become fast friends, in fact, Pixie had hoped they would become more than friends. That was why his decision was received much in the same manner as a deadly disease when he told her he was going to take the offer and go to Vienna where K-Com. She may have expressed certain profanity towards him that she regretted now. She knew now that he certainly couldn’t be blamed for taking the offer. The commission was the opportunity of a lifetime and many other applicants would call him a fool for rejecting such a proposal. But she had refused to talk to him after that. She had even refused to see him leave, instead she stayed in her bunk, refusing to talk or see anyone. As a result of her insubordination, she had ended up on latrine duty for almost two months for refusing to show up at roll call, slacking on her various tasks and other infractions
A year later, the minimum length of time between retakes, she had tried applying again and received the exact same letter back. She hadn’t bothered to apply since then. Why should I? It’s not like I would receive anything different this time around.
She hadn’t received the smallest amount of contact from him since. I wonder if he even remembers a thing about me. It was probably unlikely. He hadn’t sent her any sort of mail since leaving. Well, that’s not completely true, she thought to herself. A week after Maaka had left she had received an email from him. She had deleted it without even reading it after she saw the by-line.
A snore broke her concentration as she visually traced the lines of the jagged skyline. Pixielooked back at the bed in her room. Rank hath its privileges. A private room for the squad commander? Some other non-commisioned officers might call her mollycoddled from her commanders. She didn’t care either way. The room was decently sized, better in any case than the lodgings she had been put up in previously. The man she had brought back still lay on the bed and his clothes lay discarded in a pile on the floor. She tried quickly to remember his name. Conrad? Something along those lines. She didn’t really care what it was. The only reason she had led the man here was an attempt to restore some semblance of the feeling with Maaka had been here. The Maori’s presence had been comforting and peaceful. Such experiences and feelings were a sensation she yearned for now, and she was pursuing that satisfaction once again. The man on the bed—Conrad—hadn’t brought anything approaching a quanta of happiness, and she was believing that such feelings were now long vanquished and lost to the past.
She pulled the blanket she held up around her, as if trying to cover her nude from unseen prying eyes. She quieted such anxieties away. The window was one-way tinted which meant she could see outside, but no one could look in. Even though she knew very little of the man from what he had said at the bar, she hadn’t felt many qualms about doing what she had with him. It was her body to use, not anyone else’s. She had taken the appropriate medication. She certainly couldn’t get pregnant, or if the man was the carrier for some disease, contract that as well. Only a brief thought twittered in her head that such guarantees had not been as concrete in the past as they were now.
She brushed those thoughts away and turned back to look towards the skylights of the city. Vehicles out on the streets rushed by at breakneck speeds, uncaring of anything except getting their passengers to their destination as quickly as possible. Their automated systems constantly linked with the cities own neural traffic network, keeping millions of millions of vehicles speeding through the streets, automating every movement, planning every stop to guarantee a quick transit to God knows where
Heh, God. Such matters of religion had certainly led to some interesting debates between her and Maaka. The sheer concept of a giant magic man in the sky granting favors to those who did what he wanted and hurling destruction down at those who didn’t was ridiculous to the extreme. Since she had left home, she had also left the Catholic faith she had been raised in. The severing of ties hadn’t been due to anything the priests had done or said. The once tarnished Church had since mended its ways and continued being a powerful organization even in the face of a united world state. She could even commend them for much of the humanitarian efforts that they had spearheaded in decades past. But such doctrine was not for her. I just simply see no proof for the existence of God, she thought. And what she couldn’t see or feel, she didn’t believe.
But Maaka, still a devout Catholic, had lengthy discussions with her going into all hours of the night ranging from topics covering morality to personal choice and fate, and even touching on topics of history. The man on the bed—Conrad—certainly hadn’t been good for talking, that much she was quite sure of. The only person she ever dealt with now was Ten, the squad sniper, and she was sometimes far too reserved to get into a half decent discussion. The little Afrikaner was a devout and religious woman, a little eccentric in Pixie’s opinion, but she definitely wasn’t Maaka.
No one else could replace Maaka. That was the problem she faced. She didn’t even know where he was now. K-Com was only a two year school, and then usually the graduate was assigned to assist a senior commissioned officer before moving on from there. He could be at Intelligence Command in Beijing; he could be at Tactical Command in Vienna. Hell, he could even be here in D.C. There was certainly no small amount of Blue Helm installations here. She briefly wondered what he had been promoted to now. Lieutenant? Captain? Probably the latter. Captain Maaka Makoare sounds about right.
She wondered what he would think of the sound of Sergeant Blackburne. While she never admitted it to anyone around her, Sergeant did have a nice ring to it. She had her own squad now, and she thought she was doing quite well with it. She had only gotten the promotion a year and a half ago, and felt that she had fit into the position like someone wearing a perfectly fitted glove.
Out in the sky there was a sudden flare up of color that caught her eyes. She had seen the auroras virtually every night that she had lived here in D.C., but the sight of the glowing waves of light that oscillated across the vast expanse of the sky still made her gaze with wonder. The glowing colors shifted from green to brown as well several splashes of bright blues and deep red. If I recall, the first two deal with oxygen and the later two with nitrogen. She smiled from remembering it correctly. Not smart enough for K-Com indeed.
She looked to the gleaming power-caster that stood almost as tall as some of the arcologies, standing off to the side of the Mall. The massive tower looked like some sort of mimicry of the Eiffel Tower, with a colossal spherical emitter at the top of it. Once auroras had been restricted to the Northern and Southern Poles, only functioning from varying amounts of charged particles interacting with the planet’s atmosphere. But the powercasters, the brainchild of the world-renowned genius Dr. Emmanuel Tam, had changed all of that.
Powercasters worked by some arcane concept that Pixie was quite sure she didn’t know, only that the powercasters directed power all over the city, ending the age of wires and cables and allowing people to activate all sorts of technology no matter where they were in the affected area. One of the byproducts of the technology was that by flooding the air with charged particles the powercasters caused auroras virtually over every powercaster in the world. And given that the planet had over 70% coverage, seeing a perfectly empty sky was becoming rarer and rarer.
Still, the shifting colors were just about as beautiful as a perfectly empty night’s sky. And given the massive light pollution here in the middle of D.C. she was glad she was at least able to see something interesting in the sky as opposed to just blankness.
She tried to hold back tears as she watched the sky. Damn you Maaka. Why did you have to leave? She didn’t know if she cried because she hated him or because she still loved him, but it wouldn’t be something that she wanted anyone in her squad to know. She wiped her face with the blanket and continued gazing up at the sky, seeing the lights shift and morph high above them.
Questions I would like you to answer.
1. World Building? is there enough? or too much?
2. Now that you have read it over, what nationality do you think maaka is?
3. What do you think about the character of Pixie? Whiny? Depressed? Interesting? Non-existing?
4. Any other initial impressions of things that made you think. Please differentiate between things you think should have happened now in this entry or stuff you know could happen later.
